Dino Developments Part 2

Whoa! So it turns out that I can’t even keep up with all the Dinosaur news lately… Since last week there’s been a whole bunch of hoopla about Sinosauropteryx and how we now know exactly what colour it was! Man, that’s cool… feathers and all! Don’t get me started on the feathers…

BUT this week I was planning to talk about the Mosasaur and talk about the Mosasaur I shall! Ok, so a Mosasaur isn’t TECHNICALLY a Dinosaur, it’s a reptile, and a kickass one at that. And I’ve just recently learned HOW kickass they really were…

Ahem, the Mosasaur was an aquatic reptile. After it’s emergence, it managed to become and remain the dominant predator in the ocean until the great extinction, you know, when all the coolest animals died. Which is a serious bummer. (I gather they showed up sometime in the Cretaceous period, which was the last age of the Dinosaurs)

How cool IS that, you ask? Well let’s think about all the other badass predators that would have been around at the time… They beat out the Plesiosaurs (long-necked, Loch Ness Monster types) and the Icthyosaurs (kinda like dolphins if dolphins were horrible monsters) and even the Ginsu Shark… That’s right, it bullied the biggest shark to ever swim in the oceans.

THAT’S the really cool part I just learned… I always thought that as soon as sharks arrived on the evolutionary scene, it was game over for every other kind of predator, especially giant reptile monsters. And this would have been true for the Mosasaur, except that their answer to the Ginsu Shark was to grow so large that even a pack of sharks were no match for it. The Ginsu Shark’s response to even bigger Mosasaurs? Move to parts of the ocean WHERE THERE WERE NO MOSASAURS!

Apparently that’s why sharks still exist to this day, because they were smart enough to know when they were beaten. Wow. Here’s a fun retrospective of all the times I’ve drawn a Mosasaur…

From the Museum of Paleontology in Florence, Italy.

From the ROM.

The ROM (I love that place).

The ROM again... this was the first time I used this SWEET new pen... the Lamy Safari Pen! ...oh, no one cares but me...

And to top it all off, I actually have a fossilized Mosasaur tooth. My brother and his wife gave it to me a while back. I did a painting of it for the big project I’m working on, “I Am Artist.” But more on that some other time.